November 2014

November 22, 2014

For the last several years filmmaker Rachael Morrison has been working on a documentary about Joybubbles, formerly Joe Engressia, the man Esquire magazine described as the granddaddy of phone phreaking. Rachael has launched a Kickstarter to complete her film and needs your help -- as of this writing she's raised about $11K of $15.5K and there are about two weeks to go. Here's her video trailer:

November 14, 2014

It's from the small town of Boonville, CA (population 1,035) in the Anderson Valley region of northern California. Boonville is a somewhat isolated community and during the late 1800s and early 1900s it developed its own language, Boontling. The dialect has about a thousand terms and is filled with various oddballisms. One of these, according to A Dictionary of Boontling, is:

buckey walter, n., A pay telephone. [Combination of buckey (nickel) and "Walter." A man named Walter Levi owned the first phone in the valley; as a result, a walter levi is a telephone. Early pay telephones required only a nickel. Some informants say a local Indian (buck injun) once made a phone call that could be heard all over the valley. He apparently thought he had to project his voice in a shout in order for it to carry. Hence bucky is said to be an allusion to the Indian in the celebrated story.]

It's not clear to me whether the pay telephone sign was actually manufactured by Pacific Bell or later modified to fit the local dialect. It now hangs on the wall in a grocery store in Boonville.